Stage Review - The Night Before The Night Before Christmas (Phoenix Theatre)
Stage Review - The Night Before The Night Before Christmas
Presented By: Phoenix Theatre - Edmonds, WA
Show Run: November 29 - December 22, 2024
Date Reviewed: Saturday, December 07, 2024
Run Time: 90 Minutes (including a 15-minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Greg Heilman
Lou has had enough. Everything seems to be going wrong this holiday season, the family across the street is disregarding the neighborhood Christmas decorating contest rules to try and get a leg up, surely a direct challenge to him, his recently divorced single mom daughter has just told him that she’ll be late to their Christmas Eve celebration, throwing Lou’s traditional plans into disarray, his sister is bringing her new Jewish boyfriend over to celebrate this year, and worst of all, his wife Carol has come home from her excursion out to get a tree with an artificial one (GASP!). When Lou decides to take matters into his own hands and heads outside, albeit unadvisedly, and climbs the ladder himself to hang the lights on his house, what transpires next causes him to give up on his favorite holiday, deciding instead to whisk Carol away on a holiday vacation to Hawaii, a trip that ends up more about the loss of his Christmas spirit than it is about escaping the New Jersey cold. Thus is the plot of Cricket Daniel’s play The Night Before The Night Before Christmas, a hilarious, lighthearted tale of a man so frustrated with the holidays that he requires an intervention to help get his spirit back. The play runs on stage at the Phoenix Theatre in Edmonds through December 22, directed by Renée Gilbert, and featuring a cast of six, chartered with helping Lou get his spirit back in time for Christmas.
Cricket Daniel’s play isn’t going to change the world, but if you’re not quite feeling the spirit this holiday season, “The Night Before” can surely get you there, and if it’s good enough to get Lou’s spirit back, it’s good enough for anyone. Not only that, it’s incredibly funny. The play is wonderfully written, and Cricket’s history in stand-up comedy is evident in her writing, as it’s replete with one-liners, quick jabs, and hilarious setups with smart punchlines. The best lines come inside relatively lengthy passages, meant to spoken quickly by the actors, and said with a straight face, the one-liner sandwiched between more serious ones, so that the audience almost gets the joke a second or two after it’s delivered. You have to be paying attention, or you may miss the joke. It’s brilliant writing, and it takes a capable cast to deliver it to maximize the humor. And the comedy isn’t just through the dialogue, it starts with the situation, which you can only imagine when someone like Lou, who is so invested in the holiday season, has everything go wrong. The story is not without its heart, though, and if it was just funny and didn’t have that added layer it wouldn’t be nearly as good. When Lou and Carol arrive at the airport for their trip, after Carol’s shopping spree, during which she picks out some nice touristy attire, so that they could “fit in” in Hawaii, they’re met with the news of a snowstorm that has grounded all of the flights out of their New Jersey airport, which strangely feels more like the Twilight Zone than it does the Newark Airport. The fact that he bought the tickets for the trip off of a “one time offer” midnight TV commercial doesn’t help, though neither do the airline customer service reps named Rudy and Nick, but the events of the storm, and their meeting these aptly named people may just be what the couple, and Lou especially, needs to get his spirit back.
Cricket’s dialogue, as I mentioned, is designed to be delivered either quickly and directly, or sometimes under the character’s breath, depending on what’s being said. In each case, the actors need to understand which is the right delivery for their character. That said, Lou is more the brunt of the joke, rather than the deliverer of the humor, and as such is the straight in the story. Jay Rairigh is very good, it’s fun, and honestly sort of relatable, to watch him get upset at the disregard his neighbor has for the rules, and as more things pile up on him, and his frustration mounts, Jay ratchets up his angst along with it. I think we’ve all felt how Lou feels, though watching him go through it somehow feels cathartic, and though Jay’s performance garners quite a number of laughs at the sheer haplessness of his character, the audience can’t help but feel for him, which is important as they follow him through his overall arc. His wife, Carol, played by Susan Connors, isn’t quite as serious as Lou about the holidays and does her best to roll with everything that transpires. Susan’s delivery as Carol is excellently sarcastic, and while her character is a little out of touch (the Christmas tree is the same kind they use on “Regis and Kelly” - she had to be corrected by daughter Pia, “It’s now Kelly and Mark”), she’s the level headed one in the family, keeping the calm while her husband gets more and more frantic. I like Susan’s delivery of her lines, especially as the couple is preparing to leave for their trip, and the back and forth between her and Jay’s Lou is quickly paced and extremely funny. Meanwhile, daughter Pia, played by Codie Wyatt, like her mother, is one for delivering a one-liner subtly amongst a diatribe of other lines, most of them trying to convince her father that the fact she’s going to be late on Christmas Eve is not a big deal, but for Lou of course it is. Codie is very good at delivering her lines with a straight face, imperative for maximizing the laughs, and, like both Jay and Susan, she does so with the right pace for this piece. Her Aunt Mona, though, Lou’s little sister, is a different story, though. She’s the one with the Jewish boyfriend, whom she wants to bring to the family’s Christmas celebration this year. The style of humor delivered by this character is unique to the show, and as Mona, Melanie Calderwood is just fantastic. Mona is more direct, full of jabs at big brother Lou, even more sarcastic than Carol is, and every barb is funnier than the last. Melanie’s delivery is dry, it’s matter of fact, and it’s absolutely hilarious. Rounding out the cast are Rudy and Nick, those Spirit Airlines customer service reps. More precisely, Rudy, played by James Lynch, is the customer server rep and Nick, played by Johnathan Olson, is the bartender at the Spirit lounge. These two are quite the duo, James’ Rudy a bit of an over the top Christmas guy while Nick is a bit more serious, with an oddly good memory. Both are important for Lou’s journey, to get his spirit back on track, and while they don’t have a lot of stage time, what they do have, James and Johnathan take full advantage of.
From the production side, I did wonder how Susan Connors’ set would be transformed from the nicely designed living room that she created for Lou and Carol’s house, complete with a hallway to the kitchen and a large window through which Lou can watch his neighbors and their supposed rules violations, to the airport where Lou and Carol go to catch their flight to Hawaii, dreaming of sipping Piña Coladas on the beach. Her solution was simple, and the pieces she deployed for the airport creative, working hand in hand with Craig Marshall’s lighting to make both exist in the same plane, but provide focus where it needs to be. One of the more poignant scenes in the show, as I said it’s not all laughs, it does have a heart, finds Lou scrounging through his old ornaments and decorations, and while he does this, the audience can literally hear his memories of them, one example of Renée’s very nice work with sound on this show, which also includes a soft din of Christmas music throughout. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Shipman’s costumes are equal contributors to the humor of the dialogue and the performances. From Mona’s Hanukkah sweater to Rudy and Nick’s festive attire, to the travel outfits that Carol purchased for the trip to Hawaii, Elizabeth’s work here is as lighthearted as the show itself and very well done.
The Night Before The Night Before Christmas, the lighthearted holiday play from Cricket Daniel, is chock full of one-liners, jabs, jokes, and holiday spirit, which is a good thing because it’s all about its main character trying to rediscover his own. The Phoenix Theatre production isn’t going to change the world, but with a cast that delivers laugh after laugh, and at the same time understands the heart behind the jokes, The Night Before The Night Before Christmas will help even the grinchiest of grinches find their spirit this season.
The Night Before The Night Before Christmas runs on stage at Phoenix Theatre in Edmonds through December 22. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://www.tptedmonds.org/.
Photo credit: Jim Sipes
